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Sometimes even an old, bald wargamer gets the urge to just sit in front of a computer and blow up stuff for a little while without having to read 24 pages of rules.

I’ve been getting that urge more frequently lately, as my spare time has been compressed by the rigors of 10-year-old-Junior-back-to-school and my evening brainpower has been diminished by basically the same thing. Being the over-aged dad of an under-aged person has been more time and energy consuming that I would have ever imagined.

My mind is pretty much a one-track gadget, or at most a track-and-a-half, so I can typically handle only one computer game at a time. (It takes time to train this old brain on all of the buttons, twitches, and tactics.) For the past year or thereabouts, my go-to game for virtual mayhem has been Borderlands 2 — a combo shooter/RPG with eye-catching cell-shaded artwork, some excellent writing, and a lot of wry humor.

A few weeks back I bought the follow-up game, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, on a Steam sale for cheap. I cleared some disk space on my creaky old computer and installed it a week or so ago, and it’s diverting serious time away from my Borderlands 2 play. As a quick note, I’ve beaten BL2 twice with two different characters — but I still haven’t managed to explore anywhere near all of the game’s content.

Roaming around Elpis in a moon buggy.

As a stand-alone game, in the hands of somebody completely unfamiliar with the Borderlands franchise, The Pre-Sequel (TPS) would still be a worthwhile gaming experience. All of the systems BL2 players love — destruction, loot, humor, more loot — are included in TPS. But TPS has a special sort of ‘insider’ appeal for players of BL2. The playable characters in TPS are, for the most part, characters you encounter as villains in Borderlands 2. Since I haven’t finished the game yet, I can’t comment on the story arc that leads to their ‘conversion’, but it’s an interesting setup for the game.

My first character in TPS is an Enforcer named Wilhelm. He has some mad combat buffs, a few cybernetic implants, and his Action Skill lets him toss out a couple of drones: Saint, which regenerates his health, and Wolf, which attacks bad guys with blasts of shock-y, laser-y looking stuff. In Borderlands 2, players encounter Wilhelm as a completely robot-ified Hyperion ultra-badass who deploys multiple repair and attack drones. Continue reading →